It is sensible not to employ the humble cliché while writing; but never underestimate its utility. (The word is French and comes from die-casting and block-printing, hence the implication of repetition.) A cliché could never have survived if it was useless. It always conveys an essential, albeit boring, truth. What are the clichés required to conduct a fruitful India-Pakistan policy?

A cool head is paramount. Since most of the dialogue between the two nations leads to a throbbing vein in the temple, the virtues of a cool head can hardly be overstated. A cool head must sit on steady nerves. Truth has been, correctly, called the first casualty of war; nerves are the first casualty of the undeclared war between India and Pakistan. The political market is crowded with those who twist sensitive nerves in order to manipulate policy.

It helps, after that, to have a blank face.

Nothing answers an irritating, or uninformed, or provocative question better than a blank face. The first question raised after Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s third and most careful search for peace with Pakistan was: why now? Why not yesterday, or tomorrow? There may be a dozen secret answers to the question. You cannot, for example, shake hands with only one hand. Someone else has to want to shake hands with you. It looks silly to keep shaking your own hand in thin air, waiting for the other guy to turn up. You need therefore reliable information that you will not be left holding thin air when you do your stretching exercises. But this information cannot be passed on at a press conference. This is where the blank face becomes terribly useful, particularly if it has a smile stretched across it. A tight-lipped smile is even better.

But above all else, peace between India and Pakistan requires a warm heart. Intellectuals, fact-clicking historians, professional diplomats and full-time analysts will sneer at the thought. I stand my ground. A cold heart in South Asia leads only to cold blood.

This is Vajpayee’s greatest virtue. He wants peace from his heart. He believes in a future where the people of India and Pakistan can live together as friends, as colleagues in business and trade, as partners in a common culture created by people of many faiths, and eventually as two nations who are forced, by the logic of their self-interest, to find common purpose in key strategic goals. Much of this may sound impossible, or romantic, or too visionary; but he has the courage to start again, even after two failures. It requires courage to start the first time. It needs true conviction to start a third time.

A soft heart has not blinded him to the difficulties ahead, nor diluted the rigorous mental analysis of the process and progress. He has thought about this final peace initiative in his lifetime, his own phrase, for a while. The structure began to be set up from last summer, a moment when India and Pakistan were squaring off for a war that threatened to turn nuclear. A holocaust became part of the public discourse, and estimates of dead were placed at around 12 million. One might have added that the living would probably have envied the dead at the end of it all. But it was in the midst of such a mood that the first play was made: an announcement that mistakes had been made in Kashmir, and they would not be repeated. One vital rectification was made through a commitment, that last year’s elections to the Assembly would be completely free and fair.

Pakistan led the chorus of disbelief. Ironically, such was the skepticism attached to this promise made by a BJP prime minister who had the National Conference as a partner in his government, that those who might have benefited hugely from a free election refused to take part. Rebel, or rebellious, political organizations like the Hurriyat or the People’s Democratic Freedom Party led by Shabir Shah refused to believe that Delhi would permit its ally to be defeated. They are now paying the price of misjudgment. The BJP was wiped out in these elections in Jammu, but the principle won. That set the stage for the future.

The future has to be carefully defined. At what point in time can events be made to swivel in the direction of your choice? It is a decision that only a leader can make, using facts (both public and secret), hints, back-channel suggestions, and instinct. There is no substitute or explanation for instinct. You either have it or you don’t. During Lahore and Agra Vajpayee was sabotaged; but his instincts were correct both times. He reached out to those in Pakistan who were willing to respond. They did respond, they did travel forward until the sight of success created barriers they could not surmount.

The Jammu and Kashmir elections established the first proposition of the Vajpayee formula: the solution of the Kashmir problem must begin in Kashmir. This was not romanticism; this was realism. There was no substitute to the healing touch; and he found a man with those steady nerves in Srinagar who believed as much, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed. Winning the peace takes longer, and is more complicated, than winning a war.

He then took that proposition a very dramatic step forward. The key to his third peace initiative is not the fact that it happened, but that it was initiated in the Kashmir Valley. Never before has an offer for such a dialogue with Pakistan been made from the soil of Kashmir. On the few occasions when Indian prime ministers have spoken in Kashmir, they have either paid lip service to coexistence with Pakistan or used the opportunity to be hostile. Vajpayee has taken the most decisive step of his political life from the valley. All sorts of signals lay in the gesture. He was speaking on behalf of the Kashmiri people, expressing their growing desire to end these long years of bloodshed. He was also implicitly recognizing that Kashmir was the critical dispute between the neighbors. By deliberately dispensing with traditional accusations against Pakistan (such a paragraph had been written into the text of his speech but was later dropped) he was sending an assurance that he was ready to forget the past if Pakistan was ready to recognize the future.

That is the substance of the Vajpayee faith. Lose the past, and find the future. He believes that this is the greatest legacy he can bequeath to his own country, and he is not wrong.

That pesky little question will not go away, however blank a face we put on it: why now?

Two seminal events have taken place since the Agra summit two hot summers ago, 9/11 and the Iraq war. The Agra summit collapsed over a wrangle about cross-border terrorism. Would it have collapsed on this issue if it had been held after 9/11? Perhaps the two neighbors would have found different reasons for dispute, but not this.

Vajpayee was not too oblique when he said at his press conference in Kashmir that the world had changed once again after Iraq. He did not elaborate; nor could he. A prime minister can indicate where the feathers are, he cannot ruffle them.

America has won a military victory in Iraq, but it has suffered a huge political defeat in most parts of the globe. The Muslim world feels deeply antagonistic toward the sole superpower, and reactions ranging from fear to worry to disgust are prevalent across Europe, Africa, Asia and both sides of the American continent itself. It is obvious that America needs to assuage sentiment, and prove that its intervention in Iraq is meant to find solutions to complex problems. (It was certainly not meant to find weapons of mass destruction, as presumably everyone will agree now.) Two such complex problems that cry out for answers are Palestine and the India-Pakistan confrontation.

The road map for the first has been published. Take it from me, if that is a map then I am a nuclear scientist. No one sensible can travel on that road, for the very good reason that it leads nowhere.

The worry on our subcontinent about American intervention has little to do with the formal agenda, Kashmir. No imposition will work. But there are deep suspicions about a hidden agenda. Iraq was on the hidden agenda long before opinion was shepherded or bullied toward action, and then military success became the sole justification for that action. President Pervez Musharraf first drew attention to this by a deliberately uncharacteristic remark a few weeks ago, when he suggested that Pakistan might be America’s target after Iraq. What did he mean by this? He was giving notice that America did not want to see any Muslim nation with nuclear weapons, because it could not predict how those weapons might be used in the future. If America does attempt to control, or sanitize, or simply destroy Pakistan’s nuclear capability, then it will seek a parallel approach toward the Indian nuclear program.

It is therefore in the self-interest of both India and Pakistan to come to terms before others impose terms on them. One cannot define how deep this worry is, or indeed how far America is willing to go in pursuit of such an aim.

But there is enough worry to make the neighbors talk to each other. That is good news.

As we have discovered in the past, there is nothing more dangerous than good news.

But Vajpayee has danced through minefields before. One can only hope that President Musharraf has learnt to foxtrot by now.

Arab News Opinion 4 May 2003